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 Even trivial romances were frequently couched in archaic phraseology, and the novelist who wrote of his experiences in Berlin during the 1800’s felt obliged to make his German characters speak in medieval Japanese. Tsubouchi’s attitude on writing a novel entirely in modern Japanese may be imagined if we consider the proposal that henceforth all American novels, regardless of subject, be written in the dialect of an Indiana farm hand, on the grounds that it is the typical American speech. There was no tradition in Japan of using the colloquial for literary purposes, and nobody was even sure how to write some of the words commonly spoken. Tsubouchi compromised by suggesting that the dialogue in modern novels be in the colloquial, but the descriptions be left in the classical language. He himself followed up The Essence of the Novel with a novel in which he tried to incorporate his theories, but he was unequal to the task. Despite his awareness of the failings of the old novels, he was still too closely connected with them, especially in language, to make any real break with the past.

The first important novel to appear in Japan after Tsubouchi’s manifesto was The Drifting Cloud by Futabatei Shimei, published 1887–89. Like